Things you learn on Twitter #2 – that winds have names and colours…

I came across this lovely thread a while ago. It began with Robert Macfarlane again, choosing as his word of the day, ‘Helm Wind’ – the UKs only named wind that blows from the North East and pours down off Cross Fell in Cumbria.

@AnneLouiseAvery responded:

In medieval Ireland, the winds were each said to have a particular colour (see Saltair na Rann, a collection of 162 Early Middle Irish poems)

So the north wind is black and the south, white, while a wind from the SSE is greyish-green.

Fascinating enough – then @iandhig adds this from Flann O’Brien – scholar and poet that he was:

‘People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours…a better occupation than gazing at newspapers’ (From the Third Policeman)

I feel guilty about passing on these conversations – albeit they are public ones but, as John Aubrey says:

How these curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellowes as I put them down.